Japanese Telecom Companies are Having a Robot Showdown

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) (Japan’s biggest network carrier) announced this week that it’s launching a service that lets a small, talking robot interact with other smart objects in your home.

Named Sota, Nikkei Asian Review reports that the bot will be helping in elderly care facilities at first, beginning next March. One of Sota’s powers is dimming the lights in a room to relax you, and then taking your blood pressure.

The announcement comes at a time when SoftBank (one of NTT’s main competitors) is pimping its own blabbing ‘bot, an emotions-reading machine named Pepper, developed by French robotics company Aldebaran. Pepper went on sale last month, and the first batch sold out within one minute.

Sota is smaller and cheaper than Pepper, sitting on your desk rather than cruising your workplace or abode like Pepper does. Sota stands less than a foot high and costs around £500, while Pepper is four-feet-tall and retails for about £1,000.

But it’s still clearly a throw down to the competition. Earlier this year, NTT revealed a separate robot: the sheep-like “OHaNAS,” yet another conversant robot. It’s designed for kids and forecasts the weather and tells fortunes.

Softbank, meanwhile, has launched its own robotics division. It hopes to bring more humanoid robots to humans, and nabbed $236 million (£151m) in funding last month from Chinese tech behemoths Alibaba and Foxconn. So, lots of money and lots of competition, which means lots of robots.